davehayes.org

I’m happy to announce the initial “release” of a project I’ve been working on for quite some time now: Blofeld.

What is Blofeld?

In short, Blofeld is a music server. You install it on a Linux PC and tell it where your music is, and it provides a web interface that allows you to listen to that music almost anywhere you have internet access and a web browser. Blofeld is fairly similar to applications like Jinzora, Subsonic or Ampache.

So, why not use one of those apps you just mentioned?

There are a few reasons I decided to write Blofeld. First of all, I really just wanted a project to work on and an excuse to learn some interesting technology. Additionally, I found most of the existing options to be severely lacking in a few areas. Particularly, I find that they’re…

• Very slow to import/update the library
• Difficult to install and configure
• Too complicated (have you seen some of the transcoding or ACL stuff?)
• Invasive (e.g., modifying tags or adding images to the music folder)
• Generally clunky and just not very friendly

Features

Blofeld is a very young project, but it still has a fairly respectable set of features. Currently it supports:

• Automatic on-the-fly transcoding
• Extremely fast library import/update
• Cover art (including embedded art)
• Nearly any audio container and codec
• A modern, friendly web interface
• Themes
• Song downloads (in a zip file, with artwork)
• Basic users, groups and permissions
• JSON based API

What does it look like?

Blofeld is completely themeable, but here are a few screenshots of the default theme.

Installing on Linux

If you’re using Ubuntu Linux, you can install Blofeld from my PPA. You can do that by running these commands in a terminal:

# Add the PPA to your Software Sources
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dwhayes/ppa
# Update the package list
sudo apt-get update
# Install the package
sudo apt-get install blofeld

Once you have it installed, you should be able to just run blofeld at the terminal and a configuration file will be created for you at ~/blofeld/blofeld.cfg. Edit it using your favorite text editor (you probably only need to change the path option, which should point to the folder that contains your music).

Run blofeld on the terminal again to start the application. Blofeld will immediately start scanning your music into its library. Point your web browser to http://localhost:8083 and you should be greeted with the web interface. You can stop Blofeld by hitting ctrl+c on your keyboard in the terminal where you started the program.

If you would prefer to have Blofeld run as a system service (i.e., start up when you turn your computer on and run in the background), then you’ll need to edit /etc/default/blofeld and set ENABLE_DAEMON=true and then run sudo start blofeld. This will create a configuration file at /etc/blofeld/blofeld.cfg which you need to edit (again, be sure and set the path to your music directory). Run sudo start blofeld again to actually start the application, and Blofeld will start automatically when your computer boots up from now on.

If you’re using Linux, but not Ubuntu, then download the latest release and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file.

Installing on Windows

Version 0.2.5 introduces Windows support. There are 2 different Windows builds available:

• Blofeld 0.2.5 (exe installer)
• Blofeld 0.2.5 (zip)

The installer will install the program on your system and all of the configuration, cache and log files will be stored as part of your user profile. CouchDB and GStreamer are included as part of the installer.

The zip file is intended to run the program out of a directory you could put anywhere you like. All of the configuration information, cached files and logs will be stored in the directory with the program. This is suitable for running as a portable application. If you plan to use this build, you will need to install CouchDB from Apache and GStreamer 0.2.17 Beta 2 from OSSBuild before you can run the application.

The first time you run the program, nothing will appear to happen. Blofeld will create a configuration file for you and then exit. If you used the zip file, you should find a file called blofeld.cfg in the directory with the application. If you used the installer, this file is probably in either "C:\Documents and Settings\[YourName]\Application Data\Blofeld" (Windows 2000/XP/2003) or "C:\Users\[YourName]\AppData\Roaming\Blofeld" (Windows Vista/7/2008). Obviously, you’d need to replace [YourName] with your actual username. Probably all you need to do at this point is check the configuration file and make sure that the path is actually pointing to the directory containing your music (e.g., path = C:\Users\Dave\Music).

At this point, you can run the program again. Once again, it will look like nothing is happening, but Blofeld is working in the background to scan all of your music into its library. To use the application, open up a web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8083 and you should be greeted with the web interface. Hopefully you can figure things out from there.

Being that this is the first release with Windows support, expect to run into problems. If you do, please report it (you can just leave a comment on this post if you like).

What’s with the stupid name?

Blofeld is named for the Bond villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. I have no idea why.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a song. Not one of my own, mind you, so no reason to get excited or anything, but it was interesting nonetheless. Jon recorded a band a while back (I’ll refrain from naming them here, but they sound kind of like a mix between AC/DC and the Toadies… with more sexual innuendo, if that’s possible) and asked me if I’d do a completely stereotypical and distasteful dance remix of one of the songs. I’d love to!

See, I haven’t really worked on music much lately. I got burned out on it pretty bad after I moved to Nashville, and it wasn’t really enjoyable for a long time. I’ve worked on a few little things, mostly tuning vocals for a song here and there, but nothing really big. In the midst of this gigantic hiatus, some interesting things have happened. Namely, the release of REAPER. Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been dying to get the chance to do some real work with it. This remix was perfect for finally getting to dig in and start learning some of the nuts and bolts.

The workstation I’m using is an Athlon FX62, 2GB of RAM… it normally runs Ubuntu Linux and works as a home theater PC. But, for working with REAPER, I needed Windows. Thankfully, some months ago when I set the computer up, I had enough foresight to know I would want to do this and installed Windows Vista. Now, Vista was not my first choice. I wanted to install Windows XP. Unfortunately, Windows XP needs a driver floppy for my SATA controller. Not only do I not have the driver floppy for it, I don’t have the floppy drive to put it in. So, XP thinks I don’t have any hard drives. That leaves me with Windows Vista. And really, it wasn’t that bad. I used it to play through Call of Duty 4 (which, incidentally, is the greatest game ever in the history of everything) and a few other things aside from playing around with REAPER.

Fast forward to last week, when I started working on the remix. I was having fun, learning my way around REAPER, exercising some musical creativity and whatnot. Everything was good. Until yesterday that is. Yesterday, Jon came over to hang out while I finished the track up (I was going to turn it in today). As it turns out, Microsoft pushed out an update for Vista that locked my computer into an endless cycle of reboots. Turn the computer on, it says something like “Installing updates state 3 of 3 0%” or something and then reboots. Microsoft have not offered a fix other than to reinstall Windows. How ridiculous is that? They pushed out an official update that kills who knows how many thousands of people’s computers and essentially all they can say is, “Oops.” Needless to say, the song wasn’t finished. I haven’t quite decided what to do with the 45GB of new hard drive space I have now that I obliterated that Vista partition. Maybe you have some suggestions.

I’ve always had a distaste for Microsoft products, but I would use them as a necessary evil to partake of some of my favorite software… things like REAPER and CoD4. But, not anymore. I’ll just run REAPER in Wine from now on and if I want to play games, I’ll buy a PS3 or a Wii. Microsoft will not be getting any more of my money.

There’s also a Yahoo News article on my issue if you’d like to read a little bit more about it.

If you’re a Gnome user, like me, you’ve probably spent a little bit of time wondering what the best music player for Gnome is. Most people will readily agree that Amarok is the uncontested music playing champion of KDE, and many people run it with Gnome. I, however, would prefer to use an application built with GTK+ at the very least. Full Gnome integration would be ideal, but what exactly is out there?

Banshee

Banshee, in a word, is cool. It’s a great looking program, for one. It’s very feature rich with integrated CD burning, ripping, tag editing, podcasting, Last.fm support, music sharing (via DAAP), music recommendation as well as lots of other nifty plugins. Banshee is also one of the premier applications built with Mono, which makes it even more interesting. The only problems I see here are performance issues. Banshee (especially the search feature) tends to choke on my 18,739 song library. However, Aaron and Gabriel have some very exciting things in store for us that should make slow searching a thing of the past.

Exaile

Exaile is written in Python and aims to be a GTK+ equivalent to Amarok. I’ll be honest… I don’t like Amarok, so It’s probably no surprise that I don’t really care for Exaile, either. It seemed to deal with a large library pretty gracefully and has a lot of nice features like a cover art finder and a large number of plugins. If you like Amarok, but want something that will integrate well with Gnome, give this a shot.

Listen

Listen is truly an amazing piece of software. Its interface is very easy to use, probably the best execution of a “play queue” arrangement I’ve ever seen. It’s ability to dynamically grab cover art, Wikipedia articles and lyrics from the web make it very appealing to metadata junkies. It’ll also integrate somewhat with Last.fm and do some web radio and podcasting stuff. My only complaint is that I’ve had some stability issues, though I’m told they have since been resolved. Definitely give this one a shot.

Quod Libet

I haven’t spent much time with Quod Libet, but the degree to which it can be customized is staggering. You can choose from many different views including the iTunes style paned view or the pictured album list. In the album list, you can customize (with html, apparently) exactly how the albums are listed. The depth in which in utilizes metadata is striking and the included tag editor (Ex Falso) is handy to boot.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is written in C so it’s quick, it doesn’t choke on large libraries, it’s competitive in terms of features and it will actually monitor my music folder and remove songs when I delete them or add the new ones in a sensible manner. One thing it does do that is rather unique is the integrate with the Magnatune and Jamendo online music stores. It’s really just a great all around player. That’s not to say it doesn’t have it’s own little shortcomings, like how it manages to be slightly offensive to the eye, though I can never put my finger on why.

Conclusion

There is a basic feature set shared by pretty much all the players. They’ll all show you cover art (most of them will even find and download it for you), most of them will let you share your music or listen to other people’s shared music via DAAP, they all offer some level of integration with Last.fm, they’ll all provide notifications via libnotify… there are really only a few major differences in terms of features, and even those are rapidly changing due to the fact that most of the players are extensible.

Things are looking pretty good for those of us using the Gnome desktop environment. All of the players we looked at today are feature rich and very usable and give you a lot of room to decide exactly how you want to manage your music. That freedom of choice is exactly what is so special about open source software, and it’s great to see that exemplified in software that we use every day.

So which one do I use? Well, I use Sound Juicer to rip my CDs and I tag and rename all of my music with MusicBrainz PicardQT and do most of my listening with Rhythmbox and burning with Serpentine. I find Rhythmbox’s speed and stability to be the deciding factors (rather than things like integrated ripping and burning), as it’s the player whose search isn’t painfully slow. That could very well change, though, with the upcoming release of the new generation Banshee.

You’ll also notice I didn’t make any mention of iPods. I don’t own an MP3 player, especially not an iPod. I’m a very big believer in open source software and Apple and their iPod are the antithesis of that in every way. If iPod support is important with you, I’d recommend you check the sites for each individual player and see where their support is, but not before you consider picking up a more Linux-friendly player.

I’ve updated this HOWTO to work with Ubuntu Hardy and the latest (as of this writing) wineasio and fixed the link to Steinberg’s site. If you notice any errors, please let me know so I can fix them. I also need to say thanks to Peter Jones for his work on wineasio and the information he contributed to this howto.

You may have already heard about REAPER. If not, REAPER is an extremely powerful digital audio workstation brought to you by the creator of Winamp. It’s also very reasonably priced. Unfortunately, it’s also Windows based, which presents a problem for people like me who avoid Microsoft products like the plague. REAPER can run under Linux with Wine, but up until recently that solution has left a lot to be desired (even compared to current Linux-based audio production solutions). The reason for this is because REAPER had to use the standard wavemapper interface to get audio to play. To put it mildly, that sucks. Even then it was very unreliable.

The other day, my friend Aaron (pipelineaudio) turned me on to a project called wineasio (or wine asio). What this does is allow REAPER to use the ASIO interface, which works much better. wineasio takes the connections from the ASIO interface and exposes them to JACK, which gives you a whole world of routing and configuration possibilities as well as a reasonably low latency interface to your soundcard. So, let’s get started.

(more…)

or, a stream of consciousness account of an insomniac’s (that would be me) typical evening…

12:05am

0.84 miles is entirely too far for me to drive to taco bell. i wish it were closer so i could walk and get some exercise before compulsively overeating. man, i am such a fat kid these days… but i am starving to death and will have to make the journey at some point, and they close in 2 hours. i probably should get going soon.

i’ve always been amazed at the people that are disgusted by taco bell’s food. seriously, i’ve always really enjoyed it… it’s not like it’s any less healthy or consistently any less clean than any other fast food, so why the hate for taco bell?

i’m looking forward to listening to imogen heap in the car. hopefully it’s not too cold.

how is my dad so obsessed with ren and stimpy? he’s been talking about that show for weeks, which is odd considering it’s the first time he’s really mentioned it since i’ve been old enough to be allowed to watch the show.

El Kabong: my 2 favs are Stimpy goes through puberty and the other where they join the army

off to newzbin we go. i seem to remember a ren and stimpy cartoon where ren had insomnia… unfortunately all the ren and stimpy at newzbin is dvds, and hopefully i won’t be up long enough to wait for one of those to download so i’ll just skip it.

you know, the last time i was home i sat and watched evil dead 2 with my parents. that was pretty interesting since it’s one of my favorite movies and draws heavily from the 3 stooges, who my dad loves. the 3 stooges do rock pretty hard. i don’t think he liked evil dead though.

stupid god forsaken stomach! i guess i’ll get dressed and drive to taco bell. $2 says i come back with a steak nacho cheese chalupa (no tomatoes), a steak quesadilla and some of those new steak taquitos. you’re on.

12:48am

what do you say,
that you only meant well?
well of course you did
what do you say,
that it’s all for the best?
of course it is
what do you say?
that it’s just what we need
you decided this
what do you say?
what did she say?

i love fourthmeal. WHERE IS THE SAUCE ON MY QUESADILLA!? dang it, that’s the best part, don’t skimp on it!

1:00am

i’m not even close to tired. i have to get up for work in exactly 5 hours, which sucks immensely. it could be worse i suppose… i could be getting up for school. or i could be getting up to be executed. either one of those would suck much worse i think. at least this way i get to make a little money.

i’m pretty sure the get up kids are my favorite band. i love the new amsterdams too, but they can be a little bleak at times. the get up kids’ music just makes me feel good, which is strange. it’s strange that recordings and pictures can evoke such strong emotions in most of us, both positive and negative. i’m glad matthew pryor is out there doing his thing to counteract idiots like the zach guy from rage against the machine. have a glass of chocolate milk and smile once in a while, sour puss.

where did sierra mist come from? one day i was happily going along with my life, enjoying my sprite. then, out of the clear blue sky, none of the restaurants around here have sprite… they all have this sierra mist stuff. and it’s great. thanks for that one, God.

if you’re ever trying to install windows (as paul is right now), do remember to keep your driver disc for your SATA controller handy, or you’ll run into trouble because windows won’t be able to see the drive. that presents a problem considering you’d like to install windows to the drive, which it does not currently see.

The Paul: I’m the bomb.com: on a note… for a mass cleansing of a computer, would taking off both sides and using a the compressor from a gas station be a plausible idea?

upon further consideration, perhaps his problems are more far reaching than i had previously thought.

another strange thing about music is the way that it can trigger certain memories in a very big way. the new amsterdams’ never you mind, the get up kids’ something to write home about and reggie and the full effect’s promotional copy evoke very strong winter memories for me. i can remember having a snow day, and braving the storm to go spend the day at erin wexstten’s house and listening to never you mind for most of the day. i can remember listening to promotional copy at the new year’s eve party i attended that year. i can remember working at inky dew by myself on a saturday, listening to something to write home about. i sat for hours and watched out the window as it snowed and snowed and snowed so badly that i had only a brave few customers the whole day.

none of these things happened a terribly long time ago, 5 or 6 years at the most, yet i suddenly feel quite old and distant from them. only last week, my friend’s 15 year old daughter was amazed that i (being a quite elderly 23 years old) would have a myspace account. i am, apparently, much too old for such things, at least in her mind (i hope you don’t mind me re-using this, rachel). so, 23 years old… and here i sit with my laptop resting on my buddha belly and scratching the top of my balding head thinking fondly of a better time… long before global warming came and ate our winters like a big bowl of snow ice cream.

dagger576: some music makes me think of the video games i was playing as i listened to it

i hadn’t thought of that, but nothingface’s an audio guide to everyday atrocity does evoke the memory of playing the catacomb abyss on that old 386 dale reese gave me. dos games rock.

1:38am

my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed.

1:40am

this season of 24 is pissing me off. i don’t know what it is… just seems like the middle ones (3, 4 and 5 maybe) were so much better. i still haven’t watched last week’s episode. it wasn’t too long ago i would be up at this hour simply because i was so engrossed in 24 that i couldn’t turn it off. now, i’ve had last week’s episode sitting on my hard drive for a week and just can’t get excited about watching it. maybe those chinese losers beat all the BA out of jack, i don’t know. rush says to just wait, cause it gets better… but i don’t know man. it’s honestly boring me to death. i’m ready to see some terrorists meet the wrath of jack bauer.

myspace is such a huge hunk of crap. seriously, what a flaming poo of a web site. i curse it.

well, it’s now 1:50am. i’m feeling somewhat tired so i think i’m going to try to actually go to sleep.

2:40am

still can’t sleep. why is it that the most “enlightened, progressive and culturally aware” people tend to be the biggest racists, bigots and irrational, emotional, unreasonable and least tolerant loudmouths in a given area? news flash: the toothless redneck, backwoods hillbilly and various iterations of billy bob and bubba, yeah… those are offensive racial stereotypes. we get the point, you’re an elitist, hypocritical jerk face and you think that since obviously the entire southeastern united states is running around barefoot banging their sisters, eating roadkill and spouting their ridiculous fundamentalist values, none of the rest of the country (or world) will mind your belittling an entire geographical region and culture. well, guess what: we do mind. we do not act out deliverance on a daily basis, like i’m sure you think we do.

i’m a network administrator. i am a linux enthusiast. i enjoy writing xhtml and css. i went to school for audio engineering. i scored a 29 on my act as a junior in high school. if, after reading that, the fact that i am a christian who enjoys drag racing and firearms instantly invokes caricatures of buck toothed, uneducated imbeciles in overalls with straw hanging out of their mouths… congratulations! you’re a bigot, a prejudiced scum bag and probably a racist too. your offensive and inaccurate portrayal of the people southeastern united states and their culture needs to stop.

3:13am

regardless of the fact that i am now mad enough to spit, i’m going to try to sleep again.